Posts Tagged ‘birthdays’

Our second September birthday belonged to little Renny who turned one year old on the 21st. We held the party at our house but Nora did most of the work. Our son in law, Topher has given her the nickname Renbird so Nora decided upon a bird theme.
Here are some pictures documenting the event:

Here she is wearing the little crown Nora made for her:

Here is part of the family at her party:

Here's the rest of the fam:

The food was also bird-themed. We had little individual spaghetti "nests" topped with tomato sauce and meatballs, bread sticks; aka "twigs", broccoli salad with sunflower seeds (little trees and seeds), and applesauce.

Nora made little bluebird cookies, cupcakes with a nest and eggs on top, and a birdcage cake for Renny to smash.

Here Della is anticipating the smackdown:

This is my favorite--Renny lowered her head down into the cake!

We all enjoyed celebrating this special day with her and are thankful for her good progress during this first year of life. She says quite a few words, is an accomplished cat chaser, eats nearly everything, and has ten teeth. She has more than tripled her birthweight and seems to have caught up from her early arrival.

She will not be the baby much longer since the family will be increasing with the advent of a little brother in the spring. We are looking forward to this event and will keep you posted. 🙂

September is a big birthday month in our family. I've been wanting to post a few things about our recent family birthdays and finally decided to write about them individually rather than to write about all three.

Our daughter Megan has the first birthday of the month on the 17th. We were not able to celebrate with her in person but we did talk with her on the phone and we sent her a package with a few items. Her husband and children came up with some fun activities to help her celebrate. Megan teaches first grade and has an apple theme in her classroom. She suggested that she would like some different pillow covers so she could have a themed pillow to place on the rocking chair she has in the reading area of her classroom. She sent me a picture of one that she had seen and I did a little research and found instructions for something similar that I thought I could create.

Here's a picture of the finished product:
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It was fun to look through my fabric scraps to come up with all the colors for the apples. I also tried a new technique for appliqueing the apples and leaves onto the pillow cover called raw edge applique. You machine stitch around each piece twice in contrasting thread.

I have tried free-motion quilting in the past and wasn't very good at it, but this was much easier on such a small project. I did have a bit of trouble with the giant rick rack edging on the pillow. I think smaller rick rack would have been easier to maneuver around the corners of the pillow.